Dissolved black identity in dominant critiques of black

South African literature written in English

By Lesibana Rafapa

Abstract

This paper outlines dominant views of South African English

literature critics from the 19th century to the present. Against

this backdrop, I examine some English texts written by blacks in

order to demonstrate how attempts by some critics subjectively to

strengthen some postmodern notions such as transnationalism have

blurred the differences between black and white South African

English fiction. I argue that in their essays black critics such

as Daniel Kunene, Es’kia Mphahlele and Mbulelo Mzamane (all

1992), on the one hand, adopt a literary-historical approach to

a consideration of South African literature written in English,

pointing to a yet to be clearly articulated tradition of black

South African English writing. On the other hand, white critics

such as Ernest Pereira, Sally-Ann Murray, and Geoffrey Hutchings

reveal how the South African fiction by white writers that they

discuss basically shows how the writers of fiction endemically

handle the South African milieu differently from the way their

black counterparts do. This study seeks to show that such a

differentiation is necessary, for present and future South

African literary criticism to be balanced and enriched. I

demonstrate that benefits of this kind of a rethinking of the

humanities subsuming acknowledgement of heterogeneity in studies

1

of South African English literature, include sustainable social

cohesion.

Dissolved black identity in dominant critiques of black

South African literature written in English

Introduction

The fact of the South African nation consisting of varying

cultures equally deserving of recognition calls for effective

intercultural dialogue on many fronts. Among the many benefits

of effective intercultural dialogue is social cohesion.

I argue in this paper that dominant critics of South African

English literature have failed to promote intercultural dialogue

through literary studies. I find contestations like Olivier’s

(2014:18) a worthy contribution towards confronting what I see as

the challenge of having to give South African English literature

an adequately nuanced definition. For now, the definition of

South African English literature is not satisfactorily inclusive.

2

Yet such inclusiveness is necessary in order for reference to

South African English literature to account fully for the

societal and cultural heterogeneity of the South African peoples.

I use data I glean from selected literary texts to point to such

a culturally coarse texture constituting the subject matter of

South African English literature.

Castle’s (2007: 3) observation that literature “is the product of

a particular person or persons in a particular society and

culture at a particular time” cannot be ignored without critics

having to pay the price of a flawed criticism and theorising of

South African literature written in English. I demonstrate in

this talk that such a flawed scrutiny of our literature has

accompanied its development across the various historical beacons

South Africa has gone through as a nation of varying peoples. I

focus mainly on one period of identifiable features tying

together South African English literature written by imaginative

writers of and representing in their works black African cultural

traits. Consistent with the view I adopt of the historical

nature of literary theory and literary criticism, I explore

features of this single literary period within a seamless

continuum of metonymic parallels weaving through black South

African English literature from the 1800s to the post-apartheid

era.

I illustrate in this paper how failure of South African English

literary criticism to acknowledge the difference of a literature

3

written by blacks impedes intercultural dialogue. The arts,

including literature in the context of post-apartheid South

Africa according to Mapadimeng (2013:71), are “well placed to

promote intercultural dialogue” through which the South African

nation can celebrate difference. I argue that characterising,

recognising and appreciating the “strangeness” of South African

English literature written by blacks is a gateway to the unity we

aspire to as a nation. The “strangeness” I refer to here is a

building block of empowering diversity. Once “strategically and

creatively harnessed”, diversity should help “to forge social

cohesion” according to Mapadimeng (2013:72).

In this talk I critique literary criticism of South African

English literature even as I make sure that I do not isolate such

a discussion from the literary theoretical framework within which

it has been explored. After all, such a complementary view of

literature subsuming the nature of its literary critical

discourse and literary theory is no-optional in the consideration

of any of the literatures of the world. Cogent motivation for

scrutinising literature in conjunction with its two complements

is expressed by a writer such as Castle (2007:2), in his

definition of literary criticism as “the practical application”

of literary theory to a literature one is focusing on.

Employing Castle’s (2007: 3) description of the function of

literary theory as helping critics “to understand both the

particular contexts and the ideological points of view that help

4

shape literary texts,” I explore South African English literary

criticism through what I see as most helpful features of

postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory. I adopt such

a theoretical vantage point purposefully to engage with the

particular South African context and the ideological points of

view crisscrossing within it. I argue that the evolution of

literary theory to its current stage can effectively be used

within such a longitudinal theoretical approach. I avoid

applying one superficial and deceptively stable and absolute

theory across a historical trajectory, hence my application of a

whole matrix of postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory.

As Castle (2007:4) aptly remarks, “literary theories proliferate,

with multiple and contesting versions of a given general theory …

existing simultaneously and with equal claims to validity.”

Within a continuum parallel to that travelled by evolving

postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory, I point out

what I see as periodic coincidences of the evolution of South

African English literature alongside the emancipation of this

literary theoretical framework. It is my conviction that

developing literary theory moves through even as it is shaped by

progression of history. Highlighting this history bound feature

of literary theory, Castle (2007:15) refers to the complex of

literary theoretical interfaces and interactions as “this network

of creative and conflicting relations” giving “vivid intellectual

life to specific historical epochs; the Modernist era of the

1920s and ‘30s, the Poststructuralist ‘turn’ in the 1960s and

5

early ‘70s, the rise of historicism in the last decades of the

[twentieth] century.”

I highlight what I perceive as the frailties of critics’

ideological lenses as they scrutinise South African English

literature across the ages. I collect data from what I identify

as representative critics across the historical beacons of South

African English literature, in order to explicate what for me are

the marginalised discourses hegemony silences. In more concrete

terms, in my inaugural lecture I deal with what I say is a

dissolved black identity to this day, within the dominant

discourse of South African literary criticism modernistically

seeking to impose a normative sense of structure. I argue that

there is a distinctly black South African literature

poststructuralistically chafing against an unscrupulous formalist

lumping together with what domineering critics see as a

teleologically determinable structure collapsing black and white

South African English literatures.

I gather data for demonstrating the existence of a black South

African English literature deserving unhomogenised

characterisation by looking at it both typologically and

topologically.

The 1800s: Early influences of South African English literature

written by blacks

In typical western totalisation of the beginnings of some aspect

of literary practice, Castle (2007:17) traces the roots of

6

literary theory to “classical Greece” including “Longinus …

theory of the sublime, in which language is recognized as a

powerful means of transporting the mind of the listener.” The

same writer observes that such a broadly classical literary

theory “had a profound effect on aesthetic theory well into the

nineteenth century” (Castle 2007:17). As I consider critics’

evaluation of black South African English literature of the 19th

century, I do so proceeding from the backdrop of the world

literary theoretical premise exemplified by Castle (2007). Such

an approach is consistent with my suffused contention that from

time to time South African English literature has been analysed

with a skewed western hegemonic bias.

It is significant that Mphahlele (1992:38) traces the origins of

South African English literature written by blacks to the period

just after the arrival of British settlers, among them Christian

missionaries, in 1820. A Xhosa man by the name of Ntsikana

composed Christian hymns in both isiXhosa and English, sometimes

translating his hymns from the original isiXhosa (Mphahlele

1992:38; Booi 2008:13). Ntsikana and his followers creatively

sang the missionary inspired Christian hymns to the beat of Xhosa

traditional drums, accompanied with indigenous dancing patterns

(Mphahlele 1992:38). Arguably such early written forms of South

African English literature produced by blacks were critiqued by

white literary critics of the time and of later epochs through a

lens inspired by classical literary theory.

7

The literary analyses of the white critics departed from the

Eurocentric tradition also in the sphere of literary criticism,

not just in literary theory. The critic Sally-Ann Murrray

(1992:25) significantly points out that Olive Schreiner’s 1883

novel The Story of an African Farm bears hallmarks of the British

romance genre, a tradition pursued by later writers such as H.

Rider Haggard of the King Solomon’s Mines and She fame, albeit

imaginatively mediated by ways in which the different South

African writers of white descent “[turn] the romance conventions”

in their own individual ways. Such roots of white South African

English literature differ from the genealogy of black South

African English literature. It is such divergent origins of this

white division of the literature that have a bearing on the

growth of white South African English literature beyond the 19th

century. Alan Paton’s 1948 novel Cry the Beloved Country, for example,

bears leanings as the critic Geoffrey Hutchings (1992:184)

comments, on “a tradition of English Puritanism whose great

figures include Sir Thomas More, John Milton, John Bunyan, Jane

Austen, George Eliot” and the others.

Black South African writers of fiction appear to have predicated

their works on a different outlook from that of the white writers

and critics. In ways that should have intrigued the 19th and

later century critics perhaps as a subliminal break with narrow

nationalist notions naturally binding the Xhosa tribe together

then, Ntsikana’s hymns were the first literary pieces in those

days among the blacks ever to be composed by an individual

8

outside of the communal mould (see Mphahlele 1992:40).

Affirmation by literary critics of any age of such sublime

employment of literary language would have put some spotlight on

Ntsikana’s composition as explosion of a sure black African idea

of the national, and as a sort of transnational achievement

evidenced by abrogation of western modes of writing. According

to Booi (2008:13), Ntsikana’s poetic hymn compositions, sung and

regarded as classics to this day, “spoke to the cultural and

traditional experiences of Africans” and “appealed to the

(lyrical) nature of Africans.” For me, even predominantly white

critics of South African English literature at that time,

inclined towards dominant Eurocentric literary theory of the

time, should have identified the difference in the creative

resonances of this early 18th century black South African writer.

Ntsikana’s infusion of traditionally western hymns with

resonances of black identity has escaped inquiry even of the

dominant white critics of South African English literature

thinking within the frame of transnationalism today, at least as

a disturbance of western hegemonic views of hymnal composition.

What is perhaps the cross-cultural thrust of Longinus’s

subliminal view of language as a powerful means of transporting

the mind of the listener (in Castle 2007:17) is at play here.

The foreign hymnal form of the colonisers, through what language

does to the mind, transcends the cultural assimilation it is

intended for, and unlocks some self-defining self-assertion on

the part of the Xhosa writer. For me such an analytical approach

9

was a tool theoretically even closer to the history bound critic

of the early 1800s when classical literary theory still held

sway.

In late 20th century poststructuralist critical terms, the

achievement of Ntsikana’s abrogation of hymns as codes of western

hegemony does make sense within a theory known as New

Historicism, with its literary and cultural analysis from a

materialist standpoint presupposing that the subject is neither

stable nor autonomous, but the subject of social, cultural, and

historical forces (Castle 2007:41). This is why the indigenous

lyrics and rhythm of traditional Xhosa music temporaly bear the

brand of the western Christian hymn. The dialectical linguistic

and mental product is larger than both indigeneity and

imperialism.

Produced intellectually by the Christian missionary project

established in Lovedale in 1826 (Mphahlele 1992:41), Tiyo Soga

took the black South African literature project further with a

deepening agency. Tiyo Soga’s historical narratives and other

writings tilted towards a more cautious embracing of western

Christianity than was Ntsikana’s stance (Mphahlele 1922:41).

Showing more markedly a continued African cultural consciousness,

Soga collected and published Xhosa proverbs (Mphahlele 1992:41).

One cannot but appreciate parallels between this practice by

Soga in the 19th century with Sol Plaatje’s early 20th century

preservation of Setswana idioms and proverbs in writing.

10

Preservation of this sort has invariably and across historical

periods been followed by infusion of such African idioms into

English fiction produced by the collectors themselves.

Significantly and in furtherance of the hybridised identity

project, Soga juxtaposes the crafting of his literary artefacts

with missionary Christianity. The critic Ndletyana (2008:17)

echoes this in his remark that, like Ntsikana, Soga was a

Christian priest who “turned his educational training towards

awakening the very same national pride and consciousness that his

missionary teachers had denounced.”

Varied vacillations between a more aggressive or timid assertion

of indigenous African personality continued when John Ntsiko and

John Tengo Jabavu entered the scene in the 1880s. According to

Mphahlele (1992:41), Ntsiko “expressed his sense of

disillusionment in the new creed” of Christian moral liberalism

even more radically than Soga. The teacher and journalist Jabavu

proved too moderate to other black writers and political

activists of the time (Ndletyane 2008:39). This culminated inter

alia in Jabavu’s acrimonious ideological clash with Plaatje

(Ndletyana 2008:39). In the 1890s the writer and journalist

Mpilo Rubusana “collected proverbs and praise poems”, “wrote

political articles”, helped translate the bible into isiXhosa and

wrote books also in English including History of South Africa from the

Native Standpoint (Mphahlele 1992:43; Ngqongqo 2008:47-50). A

significant trend had coalesced by this time, of black South

11

African English writers practically observing no demarcation

between the English and African language manifestations of

African thinking expressed creatively in fiction.

During the same period as black writers Ntsikana, Tiyo Soga and

John Ntsiko, the works of the white South African writer Thomas

Pringle appeared. According to the critic Ernest Pereira

(1992:3), the influences on Pringle’s style and content were the

European Romantics Byron, Scott, Campbell and Wordsworth. The

next works of a white writer to follow were those of Olive

Schreiner.

My account of analyses of the 19th century black South African

literary output must have demonstrated that black South African

writers of English literature adopted a cultural response to the

encounter of colonial imperialism that was the opposite of docile

acquiescence. In this way, these forerunners asserted a

distinctive African identity in the literature they produced, of

a genealogy dissimilar to that of its white counterpart. One of

the many achievements of black South African writers was negation

of what Mphahlele laments in The African Image (1974) as a

misrepresentation of black identity in South African English

literature produced by white writers.

Common threads through South African English literature produced

by blacks from the 1900s

Some of the black South African novels written in English belong

to the 1930s. According to Castle (2007:36), literary criticism

12

in this era on the world stage was swept by hermeneutical

innovations in the form of the Reader-Response theory spearheaded

by theorists such as Roman Ingarden, which brought to bear on the

pragmatics of the reader’s response to and creation of a literary

text. Hermeneutics is derived from the word “hermeneutic”,

meaning “the science or art of interpretation” (Eagleton

1996:57). Before what Castle (2007:36) describes as

hermeneutical innovations of the 1930s, the existentialist

Heidegger’s 1927 work marked a clear break with Husserl’s

transcendental phenomenological notion of universal types or

essences of phenomena. Hermeneutical phenomenologists such as

Heidegger based their notion of literature “in questions of

historical interpretation rather than … transcendental

consciousness” (Eagleton 1996:57).

Critics of South African English literature of the 1930s can be

given the litmus test determining their interpretation of

literature either in transcendental universals denying the

different historicity of English literature written by blacks, or

in due recognition of existentialist specificities creating and

created by black writers and the black characters they depict in

their narratives.

In 1910 Thomas Mofolo completed the novel Chaka in which he

“invested his hero with human qualities denied him by historians,

missionaries and administrators, who saw in Shaka only the

unmitigated savagery of a beast” (Mphahlele 1992:45). Around

13

1925 the black writer Mqhayi radically infused black literary-

historical forms in all his writing including prose he wrote in

English (Qangule 2008:55). Black critics like Qangule (2008:55)

have credited Mqhayi as an embodiment of “the transition of

African narratives from the oral tradition to the written word.”

Nationalist thought harking back to the days of a world view

imbued with orature is thus sustained in the early 20th century.

This after its marked crystallisation in the 19th century,

attested to by the works of writers such as Ntsikana, Soga and

Ntsiko in their varied harnessing of African maxims to create a

different literature from that produced by their white

counterparts. In this way, the constant of positing a

nationalism alternative to that of white writers remains in place

since its continual shaping and refinement by different black

writers starting in the 19th century.

Around the year 1928 the Mosotho writer Sekese of the Morija

publishing staple produced Sesotho heroic poetry translated into

English (Mphahlele 1992:45). According to Mphahlele (1992:45),

other Basotho writers to follow were Segoete and Mopeli-Paulus

who wrote both in Sesotho and English. A little later the

coloured writer Peter Abrahams’s novel Mine Boy written in English

thematically continued the concerns of these earlier black South

African English writers. The inscription of indigenous thinking

alongside hybridised black existence continued in this era.

14

Other English titles produced by blacks include Rolfes Dhlomo’s

novella published in 1928 (Mphahlele 1992:49). In the novella a

picture is created of the African as disoriented by evil city

life as her/his rural abode is turned into a wasteland (Mphahlele

1992:49). In his 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country, Allan Paton

famously handled the same theme, if with liberal ideological

leanings contrasting with the overall Afrocentric stance of the

black writers. Sol Plaatje’ novel Mhudi was published in 1930

within such a genealogical matrix. As Mphahlele (1992:48)

observes, the concerns of Rolfes Dhlomo’s narrative find

continuance in Herbert Dhlomo’s 1940 poem “Valley of a Thousand

Hills.”

What I have outlined as evidence of existing endemic

manifestations of black identity in a category of South African

literature written in English need to be acknowledged by

academics and critics. There remain frailties of seeking

certainty in deceptively fixed structures of thought as in

natural sciences and technology, to this day visited literary

criticism. Olivier (2014:18) exposes the fallacy of such

inclinations in literary criticism, with the analogy that “the

natural sciences and technology cannot, by themselves, give any

guidance on the axiological manner in which human beings should

orient themselves in the world.” Congruous with a view of

reality as made up of self-constituting hermeneutic

manifestations, analysts of South African English literature have

to pin down and define a self-defining distinctness of black

15

South African literature written in English constituting a

rupture with its white counterpart. Otherwise, the critics will

fall into the trap of some neo-Modernist cultural homogenisation.

Black identity influences as exemplified in Mofolo’s Chaka and

Plaatje’s Mhudi

Within the world theoretical context, the publication of Thomas

Mofolo’s and Sol Plaatje’s novels Chaka and Mhudi in 1925 and

1930 respectively coincided with the third phase of Modernism and

rise of Formalism. According to Castle (2007:23, 24), the

“dominant mode of Formalism in the US and Britain in the 1920s

and 1930s was … New Criticism.” One prominent tenet of New

Criticism is that “the text’s internal unity” falls short of

complete reification and accommodates “a kind of empiricism”

(Eagleton 1996: 41). This is an aspect of Formalism developed by

structuralists to see “the aesthetic object” as existing “only in

human interpretation of this physical fact” (Eagleton 1996:87).

Chaka was published in Sesotho in 1925 and later translated into

English first in 1931 by F.H. Dutton and, then in 1981 by Daniel

P. Kunene (Kunene 1981: xiii-xiv). The translator of the 1981

version of Chaka I am using, Daniel P. Kunene, is explicit about

the care he takes to preserve the Sesotho and isiZulu idiom and

linguistic features in his English translation (Kunene 1981: xix

– xxiii). For me the language path travelled by this novel

classifies it best within the ouvre of black South African

English literature that is the subject of this study. The

16

linguistically inter-textual process Chaka has gone through in

Kunene’s translation is the same moulting the other works under

consideration have undergone, in their appropriation of African

language modes of meaning making through suffused intra-textual

translation. It is not far-fetched to suggest that the

translator deliberately went about working on the translation

complicitly with both the ideology of the black writers of the

1800s and discourses of the black fiction of the era.

Literary critics of Eurocentric allegiances have been and

continue failing to see such African language stretching of the

estranging or defamiliarising effect of novelistic literary

elements, as making distinct the black English novel in non-

Formalist reference to historical meaning outside of the literary

text. True to Eagleton’s (1996: 5) remark that Formalists held

literary enstrangement to be “enstranging only against a certain

normative linguistic background”, for a Eurocentric literary

critic not sensible to the texture of a novel like Chaka with its

multi-layered linguistic defamiliarisation, the normative view of

literary art prevails, limiting estrangement only within

sociolects otherwise perceived to be constant across all cultural

identities of the world. For adherents of the New Criticism

staple subscribing to a reference of literary formal elements to

reality outside the text that does not take full account of the

cross-cultural intertextuality of black South African English

works, a novel such as Chaka does not strike as distinctively

black.

17

One more formula for black cultural representation is the use of

African folktales in the English version of Mofolo’s Chaka. In

the exposition of the novel, the persona casts in high relief

commotion caused by the difaqane wars. This the persona achieves

by juxtaposing the text’s disruptive imagery with images

conjuring an atmosphere of peace that reigned before violent

displacement. The not yet scattered nations are depicted in Nguni

mythical terms as being in peace they had enjoyed “from the

day ... the Great-Great One, caused the people to emerge from a

bed of reeds” (4). Lending a similar folkloric ring to the

narrative, the writer describes a traditional healer as taking

“the bile of a yellow snake ... the very one through which [the

Matebele] said the spirits sent the messages” and mixing the bile

with some of her medicines to give to the boy Chaka to drink (8).

In typical allegory of black folktales, when Chaka’s father

Senzangakhona’s other wives become jealous of Chaka’s mother

Nandi, the marital rivals use the traditional medicine man to

turn “Senzangakhona’s heart away from Nandi, so that whenever he

tried to visit her he would feel so afraid that he would go back

at once” (10). Fearing that Chaka might be too timid to go

down to the river alone to apply the emboldening potions as

prescribed, the female traditional healer administers a vaccine

and medicine consisting of some ingredients and “the liver of a

lion, the liver of a leopard, and the liver of a man who had been

a renowned warrior in his lifetime” (14). Typically black

folkloric paradox is evident when livers of animals and human

18

flesh are flung in the same bag in a manner conflicting with

black cultural spirituality holding human life sacred where the

killing of a human being is taboo.

Prose typifying South African English literature written by

blacks continues in Plaatje’s Mhudi. Mphahlele (1992:48) is

among prominent black critics who observe that there is use of

folktales in Mhudi. Plaatje confesses to consulting oral

sources for Setswana idioms and proverbs, in a manner parallel to

Kunene’s during the Chaka translation project. Plaatje’s

sources as he crafted his English medium novel Mhudi were “his

grandmother, daughter-in-law of his great-grandfather, and her

brother” (Mphahlele 1992:47). The presence of African language

idioms in Mhudi suggests immanent communication among characters

in their own indigenous languages despite the surface level

English medium of the tale. This is why Stephen Gray (1992:69)

sees Plaatje’s approach as a “transcription of oral tales into

written English.” Of course I demonstrate in this paper that

the function of Plaatje’s and other black writers’ splicing of

English diction and syntax with oral tales is more profound than

a mere “transcription of oral tales into written English”

(Gray1992: 69).

The demanding unriddling of the pun in the protagonist Mhudi’s

question, “Tell me, father, are these Zulus really human beings?”

(36) is a case in point. The heroine Mhudi ponders this question

as she and Ra-Thaga share details of their experience of the

19

cataclysmic attack by the Matebele. Literally the Matebele

warriors teasing this question out of Mhudi are human beings like

the Barolong and Batswana peopling the drama of the novel. From

an African idiomatic perspective, however, it may be said that

the Matebele warriors are not people – in the sense that they are

not humanistic.

Their not being human is not as straightforwardly literal as it

may seem. It is the imperialist tendencies the writer

manipulates them to manifest that exclude them from being human

beings. Perhaps their historical acquisition of a new

description as Matebele and no longer Zulus signifies such

figurative banishment from what makes a person a human being. The

bigger answer betraying the loftiness of the character Mhudi’s

thinking is that, the Ndebeles of Mzilikazi characterised in the

novel Mhudi are not real people but symbolic figures standing for

European colonial expansionism.

Plaatje’s divesting the Matebele warriors of the appellation

human being acquires conviction as he describes their revenge of

the killing of their induna Bhoya. Mzilikazi’s fighters are

portrayed ignobly as “spearing women and children”, to the extent

of even grabbing a baby from its mother’s back and dashing “its

skull against the trunk of a tree”; while another child whose

mother has just been speared to death is pierced with the same

blade after which a Matebele soldier holds “the baby transfixed

in the air”; and later when Mhudi is about to run away from chief

20

Tauana’s capital of Kunana where “hordes of Matabele soldiers

[dance] round a bonfire” in grotesque celebration of the

senseless bloodbath, “a big naked soldier” fiendishly waves an

assegai in the air before inhumanly plunging it into the body of

Mhudi’s “little brother who was still strapped to [her] back”;

and one of Mhudi’s acquaintances dies as a result of losing blood

after she has “had one of her breasts ripped open” with a spear

by one of the Matebele soldiers (32, 33, 40, 41).

It can be said that such exaggeration of a real historical event

reproduced in the novel Mhudi succeeds in purposefully invoking

an inglorious image befitting the heartless dehumanization

associated with western colonial expansionism. The subtle effect

of the interplay of images representing dehumanising

westernisation like “an English artist ... conducting an

orchestra” (27), with images of the domain of the Barolong in

which their traditional civilisation flourishes “under their

several chiefs who owed no allegiance to any king or emperor”

(25), is a hint at the masked portrayal of Europeans and the

havoc they visit on indigenous peoples in the 19th and earlier

centuries.

It is with the same effect that Plaatje sarcastically describes

the Matebele’s subjugation of the Barolong as “the new

administration” and a “new discipline” that “was not stern”,

because it left the Batswana “in undisturbed possession of their

old homes and haunts”, with the proviso that “each chief paid

21

taxes” (29). There is no mistaking reference in these

descriptions to western hegemonic power, with its known subtle

use of hegemonic discourse in subjugating invaded nations of the

subaltern world in so insidious a manner as to succeed in

enlisting the acquiescence of the victims themselves. There were

coexisting Formalist and structuralist streams of literary

criticism coinciding with the publication and subsequent analyses

of a black South African English novel like this one. For

example, the structuralist view that “sign-systems by which

individuals lived could be seen as culturally variable”

overlapped in the public space with notions of the deep laws

underlying the “workings of these systems” being “universal,

embedded in a collective mind which transcended any particular

culture” (Eagleton 1996: 94-95). From the point of view of a

nonTswana cultural identity, the subjugation of the Barolong by

colonial forces is laudable, as opposed to the ignominy the

discourse of Mhudi reveals it to symbolise.

Ra-Thaga laments the Matebele wiping out of the Barolong by

stating that contrastively the Barolong “in their wars never

tarnished their spears with children’s blood” (38), and were

“noted for their agility and dexterity with the sword – a clean

sword that never stained itself with the blood of a woman” (38).

In lauding the humanity of the victims, Plaatje proceeds to

portray the pillaged Barolong as bearing the “trait of measuring

strength with bearded men, and never defiling their spears with

women’s blood” (40).

22

The thread of indigenous idiom and concepts is sustained in the

novels Chaka and Mhudi. The translator of Chaka describes

courting and subsequent marriage between Chaka’s father

Senzangakhona and mother Nandi by means of Sesotho lexical items

ho kana, invoking other black indigenous love games like sedia-dia,

as an indication that the characters in the novel are subjective

human beings possessing an agency inflected by black nationalist

culture. This technique is reinforced in diction that is only

ostensibly English. One example is when the translator described

Nandi as “already damaged” by the time she is married to the

character Chaka’s father. This is literal translation from the

Sesotho idiom whereby impregnating a virgin premaritally is

called go senya/to damage the lady. The technique invests the

work with indigenous African thinking that negates colonisation

of the mind in true black South African nationalist spirit. For

a Formalist critic conforming to the elevation of literary form

above content and the view of only art as “the critic’s business”

as opposed to art’s “relation to social reality” (Eagleton

1996:3), unfortunately the culturally inflected form of a novel

like Chaka escapes notice.

Such stylistic dexterity pervades also the text of Mhudi. One

example is when Chief Tauana instructs his regiments to murder

Mzilikazi’s emissaries when they come to extort tax from the

Barolong, using the verb “lose.” This is a literal translation of

the Sotho verb for losing someone through death, loba/lose.

Unlike the invocation of horrendous murder, the Sesotho word loba

23

significantly points to the relative humaneness with which the

Barolong monarch wants the messengers executed. This trait

consistently distinguishes the nobleness of Barolong warfare from

Matebele vile battles. As with Mofolo’s Chaka, Plaatje employs

the lexicon as an index of indigenous thinking informing the

discourse of the novel.

Same as its forerunners of the 19th century, black South African

English literature of the 1930s defies critical lumping together

with its white counterpart. Such a simplistic fusion is not

concerned with the historicist-hermeneutic reality the former

building block of South African English literature grapples with

consistently.

Criticism of South African English literature after the 1930s

I resume my critique of literary critics of black South African

English literature, this time focussing on the era from the 1950s

up to the post-apartheid period.

It is worth noting that only a few lone voices of black critics

of South African English literature continue to exist also post

the 1930s. This is testimony to extant white hegemonic analyses

of texts written in English to this day. To illustrate, in the

1992 collection of essays by South African critics of English

literature of the region, of 34 contributors the only blacks are

Es’kia Mphahlele, Kolawole Ongungbesan, Peter N. Thuynsma, L.G.

Ngcobo, Mbulelo Visikhungo Mzamane, Vernon A. February, Njabulo

S. Ndebele and Daniel P. Kunene (see Chapman, M., Gardner, C. and

24

Es’kia Mphahlele 1992). The dominance even today of a legacy of

accredited literary journals propagating traditional white

ideology does little to alleviate the dearth of non-token black

literary critics of South African English literature.

To continue with my longitudinal approach to literary theoretical

context within which world and South African literature has been

produced and analysed, let me mention that structuralism in its

various refinements evolved towards a more helpful enlistment of

the world outside of the system of literary signs or outside of

the deep structure believed to generate the socialised discourses

of literary works. The 1960s and 1970s saw the expansion of

postmodernist narrative theory departing from formalist

foundations (Castle 2007:36). Such postmodernist theories of

fabulation and metafiction argued that postmodern fiction tended

to comment on and thematize its own linguistic and narrative

practices” (Castle 2007:36). The heroic folkloric self-praise

of enacted poetry such as Ingwapele Madingoane’s and Mi S’dumo

Hlatshwayo’s during the Soweto of the 1970s and 1980s should have

attracted universal acclaim. Ingwapele Madingoane and the other

Soweto poets do connect to the theoretical base of consciously

acknowledging their literary creations as artificial narrative

acts, re-staging traditional African poetic forms. In keeping

with the view of culture as non-static and as a social construct,

however, the Soweto poets in this category attain topicality in

their epic sublimity resonating with the struggle mood then

intense in the wake of 16 June 1976 student uprisings. The

25

critic Mashudu C. Mashige’s (2006: 59) observation about the

“worker poet” Mi S’dumo Hlatshwayo’s craft is testimony of such

an achievement of the Soweto poets: “Through his skilful

borrowing from traditional oral forms such as izihasho and izibongo,

Hlatshwayo uses his poetry to articulate a worker-centred vision

of an egalitarian South Africa that will be without exploitation

and oppression.”

Castle (2007:41) describes New Historicism of the 1980s as a

“mode of reading literary texts” from a materialist standpoint

that relied on contextualizing them within an archive of other

typically non-literary texts, leading to a “thick historical

description of the discourse environment in which the literary

text in question is produced.” In spite of such an empowering

literary theoretical environment, contemporary English narratives

produced by people of black cultural identity such as Miriam

Tladi, Laureta Ngcobo and Sindiwe Magona could not get noticed

for their effective deviation from normative conceptions of the

South African English novel, as far as the predominantly white

fundis of South African English literature during the 1970s and

1980s were concerned. These unacknowledged black voices within

the South African English literary landscape transnationalised

the hitherto exclusively white concept of the South African

nation in ways they should have been recognised for their

enrichment of literary discourse.

26

Significantly, recent analyses of post-apartheid South African

English literature written by blacks point to a distinctive

handling of notions like nationalism and transnationalism in this

literature. One example is a 2014 article by Rafapa and Masemola

published in Alternation 21(2), with the title “Representations of

the national and transnational in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our

Hillbrow.”

Regarding the direction of post-apartheid English literature in

South Africa, De Kock (2011: 21, 22, 23, 25,) argues that a

common black and white post-2004 South African literature written

in English resulted from a “transnational turn” that “ushered in

a much bigger world” where “the desire was to step beyond the

enclosure of the national”, which can also be described as “the

struggle [for liberation].” It is worth focusing on the

evolutionary juncture of literary theory corresponding to the

time De Kock writes about this supposed culturally homogenising

feature of South African English literature in the 1980s and

1990s. Such an observation can rightly be interpreted as De

Kock’s (2011) attempt to show that South African literature

written in English responded since the 1980s and 1990s to global

theoretical evolution from modernist to postmodernist scientific

thought. This is why he highlights what he sees as a discursive

shift of such a literature from the sense of orientation

represented in the way the writers of fiction centralise the

theme of apartheid and the struggle against it. This can be seen

27

as his way of abandoning modernist adherence to a somewhat secure

idea of what a concept like nationalism represents.

However, there is a sense in which an observation such as this by

De Kock (2011:25) is accurate only as far as South African

English literature written by whites is concerned. For me, such

a remark is apt more for the category of South African English

literature characterised by allegiance to western notions of

adventure and exploration. These are the motifs white South

African English literature had been echoing and transplanting

onto the South African colonial scene, since its genesis

exemplified in Thomas Pringle’s and Olive Schreiner’s seminal

works of the 19th century.

One can say that the critic De Kock’s 2011 assertions of South

African literature assuming a transnational hue were in a sense a

return to a somewhat modernist imposition of one Eurocentric

sense of reality on an alien South African socio-historical

territory. It is at this point that a different perspective of

black South African English literature should have been

highlighted. It is an oversimplification to assume that the

cultural-historical sensibility of black and white writers in the

1980s and 1990s were identical, thus leading to a uniform type of

literary representations of both the theme of apartheid and a

move away from preoccupation with it, across the two categories

of writers.

28

The critics Tomaselli and Muller (1992:478) rightly observe that

“cultures are distinguished in terms of differing responses to

the same social, material and environmental conditions.”

Literary critics functioning in the postmodernist period cannot

but be responsive to New Historicism’s presupposition that the

subject reading a literary work is neither stable nor autonomous,

but the ever unfolding product of social, cultural, and

historical forces (Castle 2007:41). Perhaps such a persistence on

a common structuredness can be attributed to what Castle

(2007:33) describes as the pursuit of an identifiable form of a

sense of the world existing during postmodernism, albeit in a

questioned state. The same period of poststructuralist thinking

continued to be influenced by postmodernism, because

postructuralism and postmodernism both co-exist and diverge.

Harries (1997:7) helpfully points out that modernity’s

inseparability from a somewhat fixed centre of reason and

technology is responsible for the “concern with the shape of the

modern world” straddling both modernism and postmodernism, the

latter functioning as a “phenomenon of modernity’s bad

conscience, of its self-doubt.”

My stand is that by lumping together the divergent discourses of

black and white South African English literature, the dominant

group of critics discorded with the then ambient thrust of

poststructuralism overlapping dialectically with postmodernism.

Castle (2007:33) is hinting at a theoretical complex of the time

29

in his remark that postmodernism “is concerned primarily with a

critique of modernity and a repudiation of aesthetic Modernism”

while poststructuralism with its emergence in the 1960s during

the peak period of structuralism is committed to the ongoing

critique of structuralism and the development of new theories of

language, textuality, and subjectivity, putting structuralism to

the test. This is why Castle (2007:33) observes that the theory

of deconstruction, made famous then by the theorist Derrida, was

a trope of poststructuralism despite what he sees as its

shortcomings of being “ahistorical and uninterested in social and

political questions.”

Conclusion

I have discussed the common genealogy and discourses of South

African English literature written by blacks. I used the

features of such a black South African English literature to

illustrate how its hegemonic interpretations spanning the 1800s

and 2100s have, wittingly or unwittingly, dissolved black

identity that for me is synonymous with the pervasive

poststructuralist subject, forged on the discourses of its

surface by the metanarrative systems underlying its form.

From a theoretical perspective, it should be in order to lament a

normative structuredness imposed on chafing South African English

literature written by blacks. Foucault (1995:170-194) traces the

source of such literary criticism remaining latent in today’s

postmodern world, to the age of modernism. Within such a

30

framework it is understandable why, for example, writers such as

Clarkson (2005:454) interpret the post-1994 fiction of the black

South African English writer Phaswane Mpe as testimony to an

eroded African identity; and De Kock (2011:22) perceives in

South African English literature produced from 1994 to 2004 a

freeing “transnational turn … fulfilling creative writers’ desire

cross-culturally “to step beyond the enclosure of the national.”

The salvaging aspect of the poststructural theoretical framework

of the current period is that more nuanced and inclusive notions

of the transnational have emerged. One example is the view that

“Transnationalism … does not dilute national and cultural

identities; rather, it encourages the assertion of identities

that can be legitimately claimed as proof of having

constituencies” (Pommerolle and Simeant 2010: 91).

An limitedly redeeming feature of critics with views of the

transnational differing with those of writers such as Pommerole

and Simeant (2010) is that, scientifically they pay attention to

the need in today’s postmodern times to explore how South African

literature written in English aligns or breaks with the idea of

certainty, latent in our postmodernist age. To their credit,

such critics of South African English literature do probe the

nature of such affiliation or disaffiliation with possibly

stabilised reference points of reality, in typical postmodernist

angst. It is with such a critical lens that De Kock (2011:25)

argues in affirmation of the “special status” of apartheid and

31

the idea of the nation of South Africa as “a political hotspot”

diminishing since the 1980s and 1990s.

The critical insights of some post-2004 analysts of literary

representations of black cultural identity are a good sign. In

Njabulo Ndebele’s words, “it is necessary to first engage with

strangeness, for the celebration of difference “to become

meaningful and sustainable” (In Mapadimeng 2013:73). Ndebele

significantly points out the outcome of a homogenising aesthetics

that fails to engage difference and diversity as “further

perpetuation of past divisions as opposed to overcoming it” (in

Mapadimeng 2013:73).

In order for South African English literature to be critiqued

with requisite rigour today, first the imbalance in recognising

the unidentical original influences of its black and white

components has to be acknowledged. Eurocentric critics thus far

dominating the teaching of South African English literature do

not yet seem to concede to this fact in their professional

practice.

References

Booi, Vuyani. 2008. Ntsikana. In Ndletyana, Mcebisi (ed.).

African Intellectuals in 19th and Early 20th Century South Africa (Cape Town: HSRC

Press). 7 – 16.

32

Castle, Gregory. 2007. The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory (Malden,

etc: Blackwell Publishing).

Clarkson, Carrol. 2005. Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s

Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Third World Quarterly 26(3): 451-59.

De Kock, Leon. 2011. The End of “South African” Literary

History? Judging “National” Fiction in a Transnational Era. SA

Lit Beyond 2000. Chapman, Michael and Margaret Lenta (eds)

(Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu Natal Press). 19-49.

Eagleton, Terry. 1996. Literary Theory. An Introduction. Second

Edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers).

Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Sheridan,

A. (transl) (New York: Vintage Books).

Harries, K. 1997. The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: MIT Press).

Hutchings, Geoffrey. 1992. Paton the Puritan. In Chapman, M.,

Gardner, C and Es’kia Mphahlele (eds.). South African English

Literature (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker). 184 - 198.

Kunene, Daniel P. 1981. Introduction. Chaka (Nairobi etc.:

Heinemann Educational Books Inc.)

Mapadimeng, M.S. 2013. The Arts and Interracial Dialogue in

Post-apartheid South Africa: Towards Non-racialism? Ebewo, P.,

Stevens, I. and Mzo Sirayi (eds). Africa and Beyond: Arts and Sustainable

33

Development (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

69 – 81.

Mashige, Mashudu C. 2006. Identity and Culture in Mi S’dumo

Hlatshwayo’s worker poetry. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde (43(2): 141 –

160.

Mofolo, Thomas. 1981. Chaka (Nairobi etc.: Heinemann

Educational Books Inc.).

Mphahlele, E’skia. 1992. Landmarks of Literary History: A

Black Perspective. In Chapman, M., Gardner, C and Es’kia

Mphahlele (eds.). South African English Literature (Johannesburg: Ad.

Donker). 37 – 59.

Murray, Sally-Ann. 1992. Olive Schreiner: “A Soul Struggling

with its Material Surroundings.” In Chapman, M., Gardner, C and

Es’kia Mphahlele (eds.). South African English Literature

(Johannesburg: Ad. Donker). 19 - 38.

Ngqongqo, S.J. 2008. Mpilo Walter Benson Rubusana. In

Mdletyana, M. (ed.). African Intellectuals in 19th and Early 20th Century South

Africa (Cape Town: HSRC Press). 45 – 54.

Olivier, Bert. 2014. Education at the Crossroads: looking Back;

Looking Forward (Part 1): Democracy, Autonomy, Capitalism and

Ecology. Alternation 21(1): 15 – 40.

34

Pereira, Ernest. 1992. Thomas Pringle: An Introductory Guide.

In Chapman, M., Gardner, C and Es’kia Mphahlele (eds.). South

African English Literature (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker). 1 - 18.

Pommerolle, Marie-Emannuelle and Simeant, Johanna. 2010.

African voices and activists at the WSF in Nairobi: The uncertain

ways of transnational African activism. American Sociological

Association (XVI.1): 82 – 93.

Rafapa, Lesibana and Masemola, Kgomotso. 2014. Representations

of the National and Transnational in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our

Hillbrow. Alternation 21(2): 83 - 98.

35